Quite honestly, I’m not much into online social networks. A membership with sites like MySpace or Facebook doesn’t appeal to me since I don’t see what the benefit would be, and although I’m a member, I don’t have a use for Flickr or YouTube at the moment. Nevertheless, I appreciate the existence of these networks because they allow me to find information or look up stuff I like, for example I check out new music through MySpace.
Creating strong passwords for all your online accounts is not a thing you should do. It is a thing you must do. Two months ago, my Google account was hacked into. The hackers changed my password and blocked my access to the account. Luckily, I discovered this early and got Google to change my password via my secondary email account.
Last week, the MakeUseOf Google account was also hacked into and the hacker had the audacity to transfer the MakeUseOf domain out and blackmail the owner. In case you are still thinking that your password is strong and safe, maybe it’s time to wake up.
File sharing between Macs and Windows is a little lob-sided. Out of the box, Macs can detect any Windows computer connected to the local network. It appears right on the Finder’s sidebar. So naturally, it is very easy for a Windows user to share their files with anyone on a Mac. The reverse process - allowing a Mac to share its files - requires a little more attention. The transition from Tiger to Leopard has made it a little bit more complicated for regular users to set up shared folders because the setting has been “disguised”.
Cheating at a game is bending the rules a little bit, to make it easier on yourself or to change the overall experience. Most of the time, cheats are implemented to give users the ability to tweak the gameplay in a way which they prefer.
Doing this is nothing to be ashamed of, at least if you’re playing it offline. Of course, opinions may vary widely on this subject.
Cheating can help you achieve something, which would otherwise be out of your reach. It also enables you to experience a game in the way you like it. I for one always use cheats while playing Grand Theft Auto, not because I think it’s too hard a game but just because I like it that way.
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The next release of Ubuntu (8.10 Intrepid Ibex) is just round the corner. So it’s time again to upgrade the Ubuntu release that you are using and a good time to consider trying out Ubuntu if you have never done so before.
Let’s take a look at some of the options you have and then we will have a brief look at what the new things are and the anticipated additions to Ubuntu Intrepid as well as where we can find them. |
A job hunting friend wanted to Google details on a prospective company. A normal search yielded lots of search results but how do you get the latest up to date information? Google results quite routinely includes pages from the way distant past.
There are two faces to the ‘date’ conundrum.
1. How to find the date of the page I am reading?
2. How to search within a specific date?
You’d be amazed at some of the simple things that people can’t do computer / internet-wise. They can install Linux on their computers or set up a webcam security system but when it comes to simple basic things, their minds go completely blank!
So I’ve decided to go “back to basics” for a while, go through my Gmail archive, look at some of the email requests that I have received, and show Make Use Of readers some of the simple basic stuff.
Our lives are made up of work, friends, family, hobbies, events, clubs, and so on. Because our lives are so diversified we often have multiple email accounts. Gmail is a great, free email program that has a lot of functionality. If you have more than one Gmail account you can easily link them together so you can receive and send email from one master Gmail account and keep everything together without having to switch back and forth between accounts.
Here are the 4 steps you will need to complete to link your Gmail email accounts together:
BitTorrent is great for sharing large files. If you have been using BitTorrent for some time you know the kind of stuff you can find out there. From movies to TV to games to Stanford lectures.
Here is how you can manage and download your torrents remotely which means that you can start a torrent download on your home computer while you are at your friends place or anywhere with access to the internet. So that when you come back home the downloading is already finished and it’s ready to use.
Sweeeeet? Lets make it happen.
You Will Need:
If you’re a web addict like myself, you’ll likely have a Twitter account, a filled-to-capacity RSS feed reader - or both. I take any chance that I can to cut down on the number of information sources which my OCD self must check per day. It hit me not too long ago that with the right tools, I can send RSS feeds to Twitter and turn my Twitter home page and my Twitter client into a feed reader.
For purposes of this piece, I’m going to assume that you have a working knowledge of both the Twitter service and RSS feeds. If not, check out Aibek’s primer on feed-readers and RSS feeds.
The Right-Click menu is one of the most messed with pieces of Windows. If you have installed a large amount of applications, your right-click menu can become quite large and eventually just take way too long to load.
Of course, it is possible to remove and add options to the right-click menu. Both of which can be quite productive and fun. (There was a previous article Customize Your ‘Send To’ Right-Click Windows Menu written by Jimmy on how to add more options to the “Send To” field. Some other article related to Windows right lick menu can be found here.)
I have been talking a lot about User Access Control (UAC) lately. I was quoted in the New York Times last week about some of Vista’s fumbles and it brought me back to how bad the UAC interface really is. I have had it disabled for some time now and you can find instructions on how to disable UAC here on MakeUseOf. BUT if you think about the UAC like a safety on a pistol, by disabling it you are “living on the edge” and with a bigger chance of an accident taking place.
So you like to share your music eh?
Yes we know that you can let other people on your network connect and listen to your iTunes library. We also know you are sucking up the office bandwidth and wasting valuable company time.
BUT….don’t worry we wont narc on you to your HR department or even the RIAA! And of course being the curious young admin you are, we would be more than happy to help you find out who on your network is listening to your tunes. If you are into it, keep on reading!
Are New Year’s resolutions a sure way to send you into a depressive phase by the end of January? In general, New Year’s resolutions are a prime example of how bad we are at sticking to promises made to ourselves.
Why is it that it is so hard to stick to resolutions and reach personal goals?
For one I believe many resolutions or goals aren’t realistic. Even if they are realistic, simply setting a goal isn’t enough. You must split up the path to reaching your goal into many small steps; you must identify the possible pitfalls that could lead to failure and you must prepare for them, at least roughly; finally, you must take into account that things will change with time, hence your path or your goal may change and you must be willing to adapt in time.
Sure, normal people only need to be connected to one Exchange server or have open only one instance of Outlook. I guess that means I am not normal! I have several Exchange servers I use daily and sometimes I need to be connected to more than one in a clip - and until now this posed a huge problem. When you try to open a second instance of Outlook it would just open it within the current context.
In plain English it would open a duplicate inbox to the one I already had open. It was doing nothing for me when I need to multi-task.
I’ll bet that headline got your attention!
We all know that the purpose of computer passwords is to protect personal information that you’ve stored on your computer, and in your online accounts.
With access to your passwords, cyber-criminals (they come in all shapes, sizes and flavors - so don’t be fooled), can and will, steal your identity and without a doubt severely compromise your financial security. Stolen passwords have the potential to cause serious havoc in your life.
There are numerous ways of course that a password, or software license key, can be stolen. Popular methods employed by cyber criminals include, but are not limited to:
Downloading a movie is sometimes like heading into Oblivion. You have no certainty of exactly what you’ll end up with. Be it a crappy movie in great quality or (even worse) a great movie in crappy quality.
For instance, you’ll never want to watch your favorite movie in cam format, which sounds as if you’re standing in an empty factory hall. Quality matters - higher definitions are there for a reason.
If you’re in need of a great script, check IMDB. On the other hand, if you’re looking for more information about the download itself, there are two things you’ll need to do.
Back in February Mark wrote an article, Are You Sure Your Email Isn’t Being Hacked. It provided step by step instructions on how to setup “electronic tripwire” in your email. When someone opens it the account owner gets alerted.
This time I want to go over one new Gmail feature. It watches your account and displays a notification when someone else logs into your account. Basically a nice little feature from Gmail team that lets you check if someone has hacked into your Gmail account.
There once was a great cat, named the WAMPUS cat. However, this article is not about that cat. This article is about a server. A great majority of websites are run by a trio of services - Apache, MySQL and PHP. Apache is the web server, which handles browser requests and sends the information across the internet to your browser. PHP is the programming language that many sites are written in - this creates dynamic content which in turn is sent to Apache, which sends the data to your browser. And finally, MySQL is the database which stores the information for programs. PHP is used to access this database.
Switching over from Windows to Mac is relatively painless because Mac has support for a lot of commonly used files like Microsoft Word documents, Powerpoint slideshows and Adobe PDF files. So, compatibility is hardly an issue. One thing which you do have to take note of however while switching over to Mac is your iTunes library. So how do you migrate your iTunes library from Windows to Mac
iTunes for Windows is built with Windows Media Audio (WMA) support - it is able to play and convert WMAs. However, because WMA is a proprietary codec, it isn’t available in iTunes for Mac. If you’re not careful, you’ll be left with a lot of WMAs which will be unplayable on your Mac.
The average normal human attention span is 10-12 minutes. That’s basically how long a person can stay really focused to the task at hand. Surely, this figure varies from person to person but it is the general opinion that a person’s productivity will decrease after this time frame.
Have you ever taken a minute to just close your eyes and take a deep breath after an hour of work? Ever stopped to just stretch your legs and walk around? That’s your mind telling you that you have to rest. Ideally, we should take short breaks every 15 minutes and a long one after every hour. But most of the time, it doesn’t happen. We’re usually too drowned with work to bother about resting - that’s how certain diseases occur, Carpal Tunnel Syndrome for example. It can be easily prevented by taking frequent short breaks and stretching.
Through time, we strive to being more ‘in’ the games. Most of the time, we do this using new technology. Better graphics, better face emulation, better voice acting, etc. More and more the making of a game is getting up to pace with the making of a Hollywood production.
Then we have the other camp. The Nintendo Wii, example given. They give you a golfstick/baseball bat/bowling gloves to literally make you ‘feel’ like you’re in your game.
Today we’re going to review the third camp. People who look at the ‘being in the game’ thingie in a whole other, perhaps literal way.
It has been several weeks since the launch of Google Chrome, we did several articles covering it already. So probably most of you will have heard of it, downloaded it and used it by now. If you love the Chroming experience and want to get more out of it, here are seven less obvious, but useful features that you can hack into your Google Chrome and improve your Chroming experience.
Windows XP is, in my opinion, one of the best operating systems. It is extremely customizable (even if it is not intended to be), compatible with nearly everything, and is quite stable. Here I will show you just one way to customize it, to be precise ‘ how to change windows start button text ‘. It will really remind you how much of a hacker tweaker you really are.
First, to do it the easy way, you need to download a program that will really assist you in helping you find what you are looking for and making sure you do not mess up along the way. After you have downloaded it, run the .exe file, so that we may begin tweaking.
No, don’t get excited, Google hasn’t released the Mac and Linux versions of its new browser just yet, but here’s the next best thing. The good folks over at Code Weavers have come out with a way to run the Windows version of Google’s Chrome on non-Windows computers. They’ve used Wine to make it run on the other OS’s and they’ve called their creation Cross Over Chromium.
I’m running a Mac, so I’ll be talking only about the Mac version here, but I would guess the Linux version can’t be too different.
Windows Vista has often been criticized for being bloated and slow and everyone unanimously seems to agree that Vista is a beast that Microsoft needn’t have confronted us with. Beast or not though, Vista is here to stay. It is bundled with nearly every computer now sold and it looks like we’ll have to live with it for some time to come.
I’ve been using Vista since it came with my notebook and actually find it to be better than Windows XP. Although I have the benefit of using a fairly recent machine and, even then, I have had to customize Vista quite a bit to save on some memory and speed up daily tasks.
If you’re like me, you frequently need to move the same types of files to the same places over and over again. While you could keep a shortcut pointing to that location on your Desktop, there’s an even easier (and more flexible) way to quickly move files to a favorite place. The secret lies in the “Send To” command found in your right-click contextual menu.
Normal guys like me usually love comic books. I mean, come on, super powered babes in tight suits, which one of you guys could turn your eyes away from that? And as with everything else in our lives, comic books have also moved into e-territory - the computer and net. There are also web comics.
While nothing can beat dead tree printed comicbooks during ‘morning rituals’, reading your friendly neighborhood heroes on-screen could also be nice. Doing it on the Mac makes everything even more nicer.
Whenever an application stops responding, there are usually three options to get things back on track again. But first, how would you know if an application has hung? The three cardinal symptoms are the spinning beach ball, increased CPU usage and systemic unresponsiveness. If you’re experiencing any one of these, especially the infamous spinning beach ball of death (SBBOD), you’ve definitely got an application that isn’t working the way it should.
So the first option when faced with a frozen or unresponsive application is to kill it. Not literally, of course! We can try to kill or “terminate” the program. The easiest way to do this is to simply right-click the application in the Dock and select ‘Force Quit’.
Earlier in the series, we showed you how to play PlayStation and PlayStation 2 games on your PC. This time, we are taking on some old school consoles.
Those who’ve been around long enough will be able to recall the days of the good old SNES (Super Nintendo Entertainment System). Teenagers of the last generation might still remember the Nintendo 64 and (who can forget) the GameBoy Advance. These are the three systems we’re going to take a look at today.
If you’ve followed the previous guides, you’ll be relieved to see that emulation of these somewhat older systems is a whole lot simpler.
My mother and I have a tradition. Every year, she sends me a DVD recording of the Edinburgh Military Tattoo which is shown on BBC television every August. I have quite a few years worth of Tattoo recordings now - mostly Scottish bagpipe music so when I get a bit homesick, I turn it on, crank up the volume and start dancing round the room!
The other day I decided to merge some of the “avi” video files into one big “avi” file so they can be played continuously. Video file merging can be done easily and quickly with a piece of free open source software called VirtualDub.
Hey, Hey, Hey!
AskTheAdmin here again with another free tool that I can’t live without. As TheAdmiN I have literally over 10,000 servers in production. Most of them are on the same corporate open license program and have the same serial number and need no activation. BUT there are more than a few machines that are not owned by my company and were installed, configured and shipped to us as-is.
When one of these machines crash or are about to fail there is little I can do other than call the respective company’s support staff. I hate relying on other people!
If you use Microsoft PowerPoint then I’ll bet that you occasionally need to visit a website from within PowerPoint. What this has meant in the past is that you insert a weblink into the slide, then during the presentation when you get to that slide you click on the link and a browser will open giving you access to the page you requested.
The problem with that is when you are through with the page you have to close or minimze the browser and go back to your presentation. Wouldn’t it be great if there was a way to open a browser right in the slide and you didn’t have to leave your presentation?
Among many other things, the internet provides us with tons of information. Unfortunately, there is no friendly librarian who knows the ins and outs of the collection, understands just what we’re looking for and can guide us. Of course there are search engines, but sometimes a search engine won’t do because what we’re looking for is too complicated or random or requires the knowledge and experience of an expert.
When searching for answers, there are three basic principles that you should follow to yield great results:
That’s simple, right? Wrong! Often that is the toughest part.
Most things will work well on Mac but unfortunately, every operating system has its limitations. On Macs, we have what we call “quirks”. These quirks are random issues which are pretty simple to solve but Apple just won’t. OS X users will then rally on the Apple Support forums to try and unravel the solution. Some succeed, others aren’t so lucky. It mostly depends on the issue at hand.
Here’s one: iCal syncs your contacts’ birthdays from Address Book and creates a calendar for it. The problem is you can’t edit it to add an alarm in order to remind yourself about your friend’s birthday. It’s a simple issue, isn’t it? There just doesn’t seem to be a “fix” for it.
Do you dual-boot Windows and Linux? If you do, then you’re probably familiar with the different file systems that the two operating systems use and the difficulty in transferring files between the two. While most modern Linux operating systems can read and write to Windows file systems (NTFS and FAT/FAT32), Windows can’t read or write to Linux file systems (Ext2 and Ext3).
A couple of days back, after surviving an accident, my girlfriend’s father decided to cheer me up by giving me his very nice Sony Ericsson K750i mobile phone. This gave me the opportunity to learn how to make MP3 ringtones - and it made me realise it’s not as difficult as I thought. All you need is your desired MP3, Audacity and the mobile phone software to transfer the MP3 to your phone.
Google Calendar is a great, if not the best available tool to share calendars. However, it’s tedious to edit and keep track of it via the web interface. In saving time, integration is your best friend.
Naturally, there is a vast amount of addons and tools to sync, integrate and simply work more efficiently with Google Calendar. For example you can sync it with mobile devices like the Blackberry or iPhone using GoogleSync. Then you can add Google Calendar to Gmail with several different Greasemonkey scripts. Now I will explain how to add it to Thunderbird.
Back in January I treated myself to a new laptop, a mobile workstation. Compared to my old laptop, the new machine was operating at the speed of light. However, with all the software that came and went over the months, and despite regular system maintenance, some minor but annoying bugs had crept in along with the performance slowly declining. At some point reinstalling your machine simply is inevitable. Although my system was not at that point yet, I decided it was time to clear the battlefield last weekend.
Have you ever wanted to create your own wiki site?
Maybe something like Wikipedia but on a smaller scale?
Hmm….maybe I should start this article off with the definition of what a wiki is:
According to Wikipedia :
A wiki is a collection of web pages designed to enable anyone who accesses it to contribute or modify content, using a simplified markup language. Wikis are often used to create collaborative websites and to power community websites. The collaborative encyclopedia Wikipedia is one of the best-known wikis.
Have you ever wanted to send sensitive information to someone else over the internet? I’m sure you must’ve felt a little paranoid about your details getting stolen along the way. Ever wished there was a way to send messages across to a friend without others knowing? Or even not having the slightest hint that you’re sending a secret message? Do you need a way to disguise your message so that no one could tell anything from plainly looking at it?
Magicians often use this method to distract their audiences away from what is really happening — it’s called misdirection. This is mainly to get someone to focus their attention on something, while you’re performing something totally different.
If you are one who strives for greater productivity on computers you probably know that having to switch between the keyboard and the mouse in the middle of your work is so painful. While keyboard buffs can use shortcuts to remain at the keyboard, what if you mostly interact with the mouse? Or what if you don’t want to memorize shortcut keys?
Well the solution is screen actions. Linux offers a variety of ways to get the screen actions going. Here are two ways to get screen actions on your Ubuntu desktop (this will work for other distros as well. Menus and names may vary):
What happens when BitTorrent meets Hamachi meets remote desktop meets networking? Well you get something similar to Remobo. Remobo lets you create an IPN which is an Instant Private Network.
Lets see what you can do with an IPN, Remobo and how to set it all up.
Remobo allows you to:
Up until recently, I was using numerous Greasemonkey scripts to add separate tabs in FriendFeed so that I could access sites like Ping.fm, Kwippy & Google Reader directly from my account. The disadvantage to using separate tags though was that there were only certain ones available for me to use. For example, there are tabs for Plurk, Google Calendar, Remember the Milk, and Identi.ca, just to name a few.
Now, with the help of Better FriendFeed, there’s no longer a limit to the kind of tabs you can add to FriendFeed. In addition to being able to add any tab that you want, Better FriendFeed also helps to make FriendFeed “cleaner”.
I got a rather strange request this morning in my AskTheAdmin inbox. It sounded strange to me at first but after thinking about it, I realized it wasn’t that odd. The request was for a way to rip the audio from a YouTube video… wait there’s more!
So the ripping method could not involve any downloaded or installed applications and had to be done online - and of course for free. The end result had to be a MP3 that could be played on a Windows Mobile phone.
In the previous installment of these emulation series, you saw how to play Sony PlayStation (PSX) games on your PC.
Many of you told me (in the comments here and on Digg.com) how the first PlayStation was too outdated, and thus not interesting. ‘Passé’, one might say.
Because of that and because it was planned anyway, we’ll raise the stakes a bit. This time, we’ll be discussing emulation of PlayStation 2 games.
Continue Reading…
Anyone who is fond of videos (which most of us are) has at some point or other bumped into the situation where you can’t play the video for the lack of codecs or proper software.
Lets first see what all is required to play a video file and then we will look at how to overcome the problem.
To play any video file that exists in the wildest corners of the web you only need 2 things:
No one desktop is like the other. Some people tend to clutter their desktops rigorously, others prefer clear open space, and yet others enjoy it neat and nicely decorated. While my “hardware” desk tends to be somewhat cluttered and requires a thorough cleaning now and then, I belong to the last group when it comes to desktops. With no icons disfiguring my beautiful wallpapers, I’m a sucker for easy to access additional space for holding shortcuts and the like.
Do you find yourself opening Photoshop or another image editor a lot on your Mac so that you can convert the filetype of an image or rotate it because a website that you’re trying to upload an image to doesn’t accept that filetype or because you post for a blog and they want you to use a specific filetype.
Well within Mac OS X there is a very cool useful feature that I use a lot for when converting images to decrease the file size, flipping images horizontal and vertical, rotating images left and right as well as many more AppleScripts that you can add.
I am in the habit of sending regular SMS messages to one of my best friends who lives in the United States. But each SMS message I send (from Germany) costs only what it would cost to send the message to someone in the United Kingdom. How do I manage that? By routing the message through Twitter, that’s how. It’s very easy to do and I’ll show you today how it’s done.
One topic that never ceases to amaze me is the manipulation and editing of images. It’s a fascinating world at which I stare at in awe. But when I open Photoshop to give it what feels like the quadrillionth try, I turn away in disappointment within minutes because I simply don’t have the patience and determination it takes to master a professional image editing program. CorelDraw may be an exception, I’ve actually grown quite used to it.
Call me the upgrade freak as I always have to have the latest versions of everything. But there was one exception: the Wordpress installation on my blogs. The reason was that upgrading Wordpress was not a walk in the park.
If it’s just about downloading the latest version, then there wouldn’t be any problem. Unfortunately, the process also involves backing-up the database, deactivating the plugins, uploading the latest installation files (which could be a hellish experience, especially on an unstable and slow internet connection), upgrading the database, reactivating the plugins, and upgrading the plugins (if needed). Add to that the possibilities of crushing your blog entirely and you have the perfect combination of reasons not to try to upgrade.
 Google Maps is one of the coolest tools available from Google, and without a doubt it’s the best, most complete and most detailed world map on the internet. I love it and use it all the time. The satellite shots help with orientation in new territory, public transport stations are listed in my area, and when I have to give directions, Google Maps is the place to go. |
So here are the three best things about it …
When you go to maps.google.com you will most likely see a map of North America. Being in Europe this is not very convenient for me, so I made my hometown my default location.
We’ve already talked about Linux and why you should try it, but probably the hardest part of getting used to Linux is getting it in the first place. For Windows users, the simplest way is to use Wubi: it runs from Windows, installs Ubuntu to the drive of your choice, and automatically creates a setting in the Windows boot loader to add a second boot option for Ubuntu.
Make Use Of’s Mac section has been growing steadily over the past couple of months and we’ve published a lot of articles about random topics i.e. productivity, music, plugins, etc. So I’ve decided to start a biweekly column dedicated to people who have just started using Macs, a.k.a “Switchers”, focusing on the issues they might face with the operating system during the early transition periods.
Hopefully this will ensure that your switch to Mac is a smooth process with minimal hiccups. So without further adieu, here is the first Make Use Of “Macnifying OS X” column.
PDF is the standard format for transferring documents online. Microsoft’s Office Open XML and Open Document formats are rather irrelevant. It’s a software developer’s dream come true.
But as we all know, Adobe is not the only company offering PDF readers and writers. There is no question that better, free alternatives to the ever so (un)popular Adobe Acrobat Reader exist. One example is the Foxit Reader.